


Adrift in a Sea of Stars: Or, How To Get To Atlantis in Six Easy Steps

by NyeLew



Series: Turretverse [1]
Category: Stargate - All Series, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 06:37:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/923153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyeLew/pseuds/NyeLew
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth had a problem. How do you best equip an expedition to another galaxy when your home planet is facing troubles it had never faced before? In six easy steps, that's how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Adrift in a Sea of Stars: Or, How To Get To Atlantis in Six Easy Steps

**Author's Note:**

> The setting of this AU is essentially a world where Earth wasn't received quite so well by the various allies it made over the years. There are some changes to tech levels and the general feeling of the world; unless otherwise stated, assume a roughly similar chain of events from the opening of the Stargate to now. Anything weird will be elaborated upon later.

When Elizabeth Weir was offered the chance to head the Atlantis Expedition to the fabled Lost City of the Ancients, ‘no’ evacuated her vocabulary. She took it after assurances that it would be a civilian science mission—but who wouldn’t have? She could name ten people off-hand who’d probably kill to get the chance, Dr Jackson included.

Chances like the Atlantis Expedition came around probably only once in a billion years. Things hadn’t been going well for Earth for quite some time; if they didn’t go _now_ they might not get another chance, not with the threat of a unified Goa’uld army on the horizon. So she’d made lists, asked questions. Her number of requisitions skyrocketed after her first round of interviews, and so did her understanding of the issues they might be facing. Already running from the Goa’uld, they didn’t want to walk into an even worse situation that they were ill-equipped to fight.

O’Neill hadn’t wanted to give her one of the new automated turret defence guns, let alone two, but she’d argued tooth and nail to get them. Same thing with the prototype nanofactories and mining drones. As she had been reminded all too often, the Expedition could be one way. Earth had walked into difficult situations blind before; Elizabeth planned to learn from the SGC’s perhaps less than stellar track record. She would take no chances, brook no opposition. Atlantis was her chance to do it _right._

*

Rodney McKay wasn’t someone the SGC really wanted off-world; truth be told, he wasn’t someone he himself wanted off-world, at least he wouldn’t have said so once. But things on Earth were tough, and Rodney was the SGC’s foremost expert on Ancient tech. Who else could lead the science team on the Atlantis Expedition? So he’d packed his things from Area 51 – not that he’d had much to begin with – and relocated to the Antarctic base under the refreshingly civilian leadership of Dr Elizabeth Weir.

The woman he found was competent and uncompromising, with clear goals. He had barely any problems with her requisition form; he had additions, certainly, but no deductions, no moments of frustration when because unlike most at the SGC, Elizabeth Weir _didn’t_ waste cargo space on useless shit.

He hadn’t just asked for items and materials, either. _Personnel_ were equally – scratch that thought, it was essential to get personnel right. From the start he’d selected a brilliant Czech AI pioneer and robotics engineer and a host of others. Almost all of them had been won around, eventually. Atlantis was going to be _his_ —the Nobels (multiple!) he expected to win after declassification and victory against their enemies was beyond count.

They were currently in Phase I of Atlantis Expedition Preparation, according to the AI optimiser Elizabeth had tasked with the planning stages. Rodney’s tweaks brought them to Phase Ic; he hoped they’d reach at least Phase IIId before the Goa’uld united to break Earth under a new Supreme System Lord.

Of course they would, what was he thinking. He was Dr Rodney McKay; impossible was his bread and butter.

*

Elizabeth had hit a wall. The SGC heads didn’t seem to understand the necessity of some of her requisitions – no doubt packing pallets full of condoms had raised some eyebrows. “Scale it back,” they’d said. “Essential items only.”

Her argument of course that this was no ordinary mission, that nothing like this, something they actually had a chance to plan for, to consider every possible angle with _time_ had ever come up before. She wasn’t equipping a recon team: she was equipping a self-supporting civilian outpost, one that might not have contact with the Milky Way for months, if not years or decades. It would be nice to find a fully functioning city stocked with ZPMs and maybe a living Ancient or two, but Elizabeth wasn’t going to take any chances. The Ancients had been less than helpful so far.

The anthropologists had pointed out the sorts of things they were likely to miss if Earth supplies weren’t forthcoming, and she’d amended her requisitions again and again. Low-tech equipment, manuals and databases on such a huge variety of things no one person would ever have time to read half of it. They were already taking terabytes of storage with them; now she needed even more.

So she fought for concessions, for compromise, and filed another set of requisitions. Machine analysis flagged gaps and inconsistencies; Elizabeth saw that these were addressed. The addition of Rodney McKay to her command staff came as both a boon and a curse, so prickly was the man himself, but Elizabeth recognised his genius. Together they redid the requisitions list, the personnel files and took a fine-toothed comb over the whole affair.

Elizabeth felt _good_. In a world which got shittier by the day, planning for the Expedition was like a breath of fresh air. Stress had never felt this good.

*

Phase II concluded with a complete rework of the requisitions list. The Machines had flagged considerable concerns about power generation, and Rodney – after viewing the worst case scenario projections himself and running literally hundreds of simulations – agreed with them. Carter’s naquadah generators had come along leaps and bounds since the AIs were let loose, but there were indications still of possible power shortfalls even with the Machine-tweaked products. The problem was that they had no idea what sort of situation they’d be walking into, about how salvageable the facility actually would be to even whether there was a facility at all; the research teams said they were facing something big, probably, but they couldn’t get any closer than that.

So they erred on the side of caution, which was more than appropriate for such a vital expedition. Something they hadn’t planned on was the inclusion of one Major John Sheppard; the enigmatic Major had stumbled upon the Antarctic base due to an accident with Dr Beckett and an Ancient drone weapon. Rodney had wanted him as a light-switch, and Elizbeth had agreed, arguing that he would be far more useful in the Pegasus Galaxy than stuck at McMurdo, not with O’Neill available to use the drones in the event of an attack.

The Major was a tall, handsome man – in an irritating, cocky way, at least. Rodney set him to using various bits and pieces of Ancient tech they’d never gotten online, and he knew Beckett had taken samples of his blood for analysis of his particular genetic code. They were doing this _right_ , and hopefully a majority of Atlantis staff members would leave Milky Way with ATA expression—natural or induced, with high expression promoters.

Since the city itself would probably only respond to ATA positives, Rodney hoped Beckett’s therapy worked. Being stuck in the fabled city of the _Atlantis_ with that jerk Sheppard turning every damned thing on would be _Hell_.

*

Phase III concerned practical testing of their simulations. Put simply, that meant John got to go through the stargate. He’d been sat down by SG-1’s Daniel Jackson for a personalised crash course on the history of the programme. Privately, John thought that was just to get him away from Colonel Sumner; the bastard hated him already, so John didn’t even mind.

Of course, he grew more sombre than ever once the full reality of the situation hit him. They’d stumbled into an intergalactic war when they figured out how the stargate worked, against snake-aliens who lived in heads and thought that all humans everywhere – and there were humans everywhere, too – were theirs to control and exploit. That same enemy they found apparently hated Earth in particular, since the SGC had been wrecking their plans for nearly as long as they’d had the stargate open.

And the feudal structure of the System Lords usually meant that in the absence of the Supreme System Lord there was chaos and in-fighting. Everything looked set to change as one of the System Lords was gaining the upper hand. Under the power of a Supreme System Lord, Earth would fall.

He almost said ‘Fuck Atlantis’ then and there, but held his tongue. Atlantis was his chance at a—at a fresh start, and there were men and women at the SGC who’d been fighting Goa’uld for a decade already; his skills weren’t needed here, not with O’Neill and a dozen others with strong expression ready to power Earth’s (surprisingly) powerful defences.

So he committed to Atlantis. He bugged McKay, the head scientist. He acquiesced and let Beckett take as many tissue samples as he wanted. He even spoke to Elizabeth, who’d apparently interviewed each Expedition member personally at least twice, and with a different set of questions each time.

The first time John stepped through the stargate, he ended up in a room basically the same as the one he’d just been in. Apart from being told he was on another planet in another solar system, he knew he’d done _something_ because stepping through the wormhole was—indescribable.

But this was Phase III, so once everyone and their equipment had gone through it was time to do it again, and again, and again. Sometime after a hundred trips John decided he definitely liked flying better than stargates.

*

By the time Phase IV wound up there were dogfights over New York, Beijing, London. The Goa’uld had managed to unite under Supreme System Lord Ba’al and they’d launched an attack on the Earth, utterly shattering any pretence that Earth was alone in the Galaxy—though of course, official explanations were light on the details. There were mass suicides and rioting, but as the initial shock wore off the people of Earth became united against a common foe. The EU rushed federalisation, with no opposition even from the British; the Middle East exploded into chaos, but was swiftly reined in by a beefed-up UN with military backing.

The International Stargate Authority formed from the ashes of the old oversight committee, and the Atlantis Expedition was secreted away under classified files. A fleet of nine hyperspace-crippled BC-304 _Daedalus_ -class ships was assembled, bootstrapped together by the collective action of the ISA; three ships from the EU, two from the US, Russia and China. The EU reported three more on the way, one from the shipyards of Britain and two more from Germany. NATO forces were retrained and sent into battle against Jaffa footsoldiers in strategic off-world locations. The African Union received plans for ships of their own. Still, the outlook was bleak: never before had Earth been confronted with the Goa’uld head on in a fight for their own planet, against the amassed armies of a Supreme System Lord.

And for the Atlantis Expedition, time was up. Elizabeth privately thought that completion of Phase IV was enough, that it was finally time to go; Phase V and VI included items and training that they could live without. Would have to live without. With the situation on Earth ever-more troubling, they had to go _now_ , before the Goa’uld took out their stargate or they lost the war or the funding was suddenly cut to build more 304s.

So they dialled Pegasus and started the practised, carefully planned commencement protocol. Equipment and personnel went through in parallel, and when everyone who was going to go was gone, the SGC continued moving through items until the wormhole shut down. With a turn of her head, just before she left Earth for what was quite possibly the last time, she saw Daniel Jackson arguing with O’Neill.

 _Not a chance, Jackson_ , she thought. He was the one concession she hadn’t won, the one thing on her list she hadn’t got the chance to take. Every member of her team was hard won, given the case for retaining as many useful bodies on Earth as was humanly possible; but equally, if Earth were to go down once and for all, Atlantis would be their only hope for survival.

Elizabeth stepped through the Stargate with a grim determination to find something that could remove the Goa’uld from power once and for all.


End file.
